Thursday, October 23, 2014

Irishman Benny Lewis, 29, has been on the road for 416 weeks,
almost 3,000 days, travelling to dozens of countries with few possessions and
fewer funds in his back pocket. He has written 29 Life Lessons I Learned
While Traveling The World For Eight Years Straight. I connect with him on
most though not all of them; his #1 point is a killer app: “Everyone everywhere
basically wants the same thing.” Benny writes that “Vastly different as the
world’s cultures are, if you speak to Italian millionaires, homeless
Brazilians, Dutch fishermen and Filipino computer programmers, in their
own languages, you start to see that we are all incredibly alike where it
matters. Everyone just wants validation, love, security, enjoyment and hopes
for a better future. The way they verbalise this and work towards it is where
things branch off, but we all have the same basic desires. You can relate
to everyone in the world if you look past the superficial
things that separate you.

Kitchen
Confidential’s fourth season has started, and Anthony Bourdain gave a
lengthy interview to the Wall
St Journal, in which he notes: "I assumed humans were basically bad
people and if you stumbled…you would be devoured. I don't believe that
anymore." Instead, reports WSJ, he has been heartened by the hospitality
that he's encountered while traveling around the world, even in places he
thought would be hostile to Americans. "It made me hopeful and made me
feel better about the human species," he says. "We like to be good,
we aspire to do good things, and we're generally trudging through life trying
to do the best we can." Next year, says WSJ, Bourdain plans to open a
"world market" in New York. Modeled on a Singaporean hawker center,
it will have stalls of food from different cultures and countries, such as a
halal stand or a Malay section. It will include some of his favorite purveyors
from his travels, with a particular focus on Asian cuisine, which he especially
likes. For his last meal, he says, he'd go out for high-end sushi.

Is there a universal word, a rare linguistic token that is
found across all languages? A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics reckons so. "We sampled 31 languages from diverse
language families around the world in this study, and we found that all of them
have a word with a near-identical sound and function as English “Huh?” The
grunt-like "huh?" — when one is too confused for words and too caught
off guard for "pardon?" — may seem to be a special form of rudeness
reserved for English, but has found it is anything but.